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The Upper Wimpole Street Literary Salon provides a forum for women writers to meet and exchange ideas about ongoing work. We are a diverse group of over 200 writers from the fields of biography, journalism, fiction, poetry and scriptwriting. We meet about 5 times a year in central London. Each salon features members presenting a recently published book or a work-in-progress. Our informal setting allows for frank discussion of our craft and of the particular challenges women writers face in promoting and publishing their work.

Narrating Sexual TraumaWinnie M Li, writer, producer and activist, will discuss her debut novel Dark Chapter, inspired by her own experience of rape. Marti Leimbach will discuss her latest novel Age of ...
Posted May 9, 2017, 6:19 AM by Sarah Glazer

Now We are EightThis spring we celebrate the Salon's eighth year. Thanks to all the wonderful writers and Salon members who contributed to our provocative discussions over the past year. Stay tuned ...
Posted May 9, 2017, 5:53 AM by Sarah Glazer

Elif ShafakWednesday, 15th March 2017, 7 p.m. Acclaimed Turkish novelist Elif Shafak spoke about her forthcoming novel set in modern Turkey, Three Daughters of Eve, which grapples with Islam, secularism and the role of women. This novel is already a best-seller in Turkey. She is the author of nine previous novels and her work has been translated into 40 languages.
Posted May 9, 2017, 6:07 AM by Sarah Glazer

On the
last night of November, Deborah Levy came to speak to the Upper Wimpole Street Literary
Salon about voice, volition and how to ask the important questions. Levy is a
poet and playwright, the award-winning author of six novels, two of them
nominated for the Booker, and the book length essay, Things I Don’t Want to Know, which she was commissioned to write as
a response to Orwell’s Why I Write.

Levy’s
work often involves a perilous journey of some kind, and last night, life
imitated art. Something so terrible happened to the tube system that one invitee
was stuck in Holborn tube for an hour and had to turn back. Traffic everywhere
was gridlocked, and it took Deborah an hour and a half in two different taxis
to reach us.

We had
eaten all the mezze by the time she arrived, and we skipped introductions in
order to get started. With only a glass of wine to recover, Deborah Levy
impressed us all with her immediate focus, depth of attention and warmth
towards her audience.

We started
out talking about voice. In her book-length essay, Levy responds to Orwell’s
call for “sheer ego” as a necessary quality in a writer by claiming, “even the
most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust
enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.”

Reading
her own words, Levy said, as a writer first she had to learn to speak loudly
and then even louder, and then in her own voice, not very loudly at all. Sometimes
being loud is mistaken for asserting your voice; her voice is not loud, but it
is insistent. If you pursue the questions that demand your particular attention,
your voice will have power. This is what makes writing interesting for a writer
and a reader.

In
response to a comment by a novelist who mentors other writers in pursuit of
“getting published,” Levy told the story of a friend who displayed the first
four pages of her as yet unpublished Swimming
Home at the entrance to an art exhibit. The display had to be taken down
because the crowds who gathered to read the work were blocking the entrance.
Later, when an editor at a major publisher asked her to take out those very
pages, she had the courage to resist. Everyone knows what happened next: the
book was published by a small independent, went on to acclaim and prizes and is
now with Penguin.

Someone
asked Levy about research. Each of Levy’s books is informed by a huge amount of
reading and thinking that may in the end appear “only as a whisper.” She draws
a line when she starts to write, and will only look up references at the end of
the process. To write about the hypochondriac mother in Hot Milk, Levy read all the way from Hippocrates through Freud to neuroscience
about psychosomatic illness, a subject much stranger than appears in the book.

If that
book seems surreal to readers, Levy offered this explanation: “I went to the
sacred altar of the realist novel and moved a few things around to show how reality
slips.” If you’re an extreme hypochondriac-- like the mother in Hot Milk, who says she wants her feet
amputated--reality slips, Levy observed. “It’s hard to create a reality and
subvert it”—something she aimed to do in that novel.

The
importance of place in her writing, Levy agreed, was key. Like Henry James and
E.M. Forster, she often takes her characters out of their known environments,
where they react under the pressure of the unfamiliar. To write Hot Milk, Levy began with Almeria, Spain.
Levy had in mind the idea of a person who feels very small in an enormously
large landscape, Almeria’s sky and desert.

Levy was
generous with the listeners, drawing them out of their silences. She asked them
questions about their writing and their influences. We ended the evening with a
discussion about books. Levy described her shelves as full of Freud because of
the way he gets her to think about the essential question of where the bodies
are buried. She also likes J.G. Ballard, Patricia Highsmith, Marguerite Duras,
and is currently reading Maggie Nelson’s The
Argonauts.

Levy is
also a big fan of Montaigne. His discursive essays on a wide array of questions
that demand his attention are not that different from Levy’s narrative
non-fiction. It turns out Things You
Don’t Want to Know is the first of a planned trilogy, which will surely
become one of the most valuable books on any woman writer’s shelf.

Anne Sebba and Elena LappinTuesday, 20th September, 7 pm. Biographer Anne Sebba discussed her new book about how Parisian women survived the World War II German occupation of Paris and its aftermath. Fiction writer ...
Posted Oct 31, 2016, 2:42 AM by Sarah Glazer

Amanda Craig--Writing the Contemporary NovelMay 11, 2016. Amanda Craig, the author of six novels, discussed how she weaves such contemporary issues as inequality and social class into her novels and the experience of being ...
Posted May 17, 2016, 11:54 PM by Sarah Glazer

Dispatches from SyriaMarch 30 2016 Newsweek Middle East Editor Janine di Giovanni discussed her new book about the conflict in Syria, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria. Janine di ...
Posted Apr 14, 2016, 1:47 PM by Sarah Glazer